Beginning

The refrigerator is humming, harmonizing with the faint droning of a bee outside the window. The clock ticks sharply, keeping time.

Time.

I’m wasting it. It is so precious to me, yet I just sit and let it pass. I do nothing.

Someone walks into the room. They glance at the two small stacks of graham cracker fragments standing on the table beside me.

Don’t you dare touch my graham crackers.

There were two full crackers to begin with. I halfheartedly told myself I would eat a quarter of one every time I wrote… A page? A paragraph? A sentence?

The first cracker is gone and the page is still blank.

What remains on the table is one cracker broken into eight pieces, as if for a small child. I am acting childish, aren’t I? Just like when you’re told to clean your room and you go stand int he doorway and stare at the mess in bitter despair and think about how difficult it will be and wonder where to begin.

But what matters isn’t where you begin. It’s just beginning.

I am too old now to be told to clean my room. I am old enough to know that just beginning is the important part. But no matter how much I remind myself of it, I still waste precious hours staring at my mess of ink and paper and wonder where I ought to begin.

Just begin.